Kangaroo meat chili served to unsuspecting students gets cook fired, Neb. school says

Kangaroo meat chili is the kind of exotic fare you might expect to see in Australia’s outback, or on the menu at an avant-garde restaurant.

But in a school cafeteria in rural western Nebraska?

Middle and high school students at Potter-Dix public schools in the state’s panhandle were served kangaroo and beef chili on Oct. 10 as their main course for lunch, the superintendent said in a letter to parents.

That experimental recipe may have gone over better had the unsuspecting kids — and their parents — been warned about what they were eating in advance. Superintendent Mike Williams apologized in his letter to parents, and said it won’t happen again.

“If a family wants to eat exotic foods, they can do so on their own time — not at school,” Williams wrote. “If we were to have food or ingredients that are out of the ordinary, they should be listed on the menu so that the students and families are aware of what they would be being served. We will no way be serving food of this nature again. Period.”

The school cook told the superintendent that he mixed the “very lean” kangaroo meat into the chili that day because of the “nutritional value” it would add to the meal, the letter said. The cook involved — who was head cook for the junior and senior high school — was fired following the incident, The Associated Press reported Friday.

“This is a matter that I am taking very seriously,” Williams wrote.

But that doesn’t mean the out-of-the-ordinary meal posed any real danger to students.

“I do not think that kangaroo meat is unhealthy or dangerous,” Williams wrote. “It has to meet USDA standards in order for companies to sell it.”

Kangaroo meat is more commonly eaten in Australia, the continent the marsupials call home. Even there, though, getting consumers to enjoy kangaroo meat is complicated by their “status as pest, resource and national symbol,” according to an Australian report on commercial harvesting of the animal.

Every year, Australian states cull kangaroos to keep their populations from exploding — but the animals that are killed are primarily prized for their hides, while their nutritious, low-fat meat often times goes to waste, the BBC reports.

The real question remains, though: How does kangaroo taste?

Andrew Jordan, an Australian who co-owned the now-closed restaurant Eight Mile Creek in New York, described it in a 2010 interview with Esquire.

“People in America expect it to taste like game meat, like buffalo or moose,” Jordan said, according to Esquire. “But it tastes just like sweet filet mignon. Kangaroo is very lean; there’s no fat on it at all.”

This story was updated Friday after the AP reported the school cook lost his job.

This story was originally published October 18, 2018 at 5:17 PM with the headline "Kangaroo meat chili served to unsuspecting students gets cook fired, Neb. school says."